As you may notice, the title of this week’s RWL update post is titled ‘Week #2’… Obviously, since I last posted, it’s been about 3 weeks now and I should technically have started the fourth week of my HIIT Harder plan with Results with Lucy on Monday, however as I am me, I have clearly slipped up a bit and had a bit of a bad week. So as I did last time, I’m taking it back a week. For me it is now the end of week 2 and I’ve just started week three! It’s been a struggle, I’ll tell you that now! I had a week of not exercising and eating all of the bad (good!!) things and I think I needed it to be honest. I could sit here on my high and mighty horse telling you all how ashamed I am of myself for giving in and eating naughty foods, but in reality I’m just going to tell you that it’s OK to cheat (ocassionally). I think one of my biggest downfalls is when I am craving something. When I have a craving, if I don’t do something to subdue it for a bit, I end up going all out and having a massive binge. That’s what I’m like with chocolate and as much as Jordan doesn’t understand it, letting myself have a little bit (or something of the same kind of taste / sweetness) just makes the craving go away and I can get on with my healthy eating as normal. That is what happened to me a couple of weeks ago – I didn’t listen to my body and ended up eating everything sweet and fatty in sight! One thing I think I’m also going to start doing in the future to curb my cravings is making some of the slightly sweeter snack recipes avaialble on the ‘Eat Well’ section of RWL!

My first couple of weeks on the HIIT Harder plan have been successful (kind of). Minus the little week’s discrepancy, the week before last, I’ve actually been getting on quite well with it. The workouts are intense and make you work hard but honestly I LOVE them. One of the things that I like about the workouts is that they are split into 5 different sections. To start, you have the warm up and then three HITT sessions and then a cool down. The three middle sessions are usually all based around different body areas too, so there is normally a cardio section, some arms and then also perhaps some legs or abs. I find that having the breaks in each section so helpful as it kind of tricks my brain into thinking I’m only doing short sessions when in realtiy my workout is about 30-40 minutes long overall.

If you don’t know what HIIT is, it stands for High Intensity Interval Training and is basically exactly what it says on the tin. It kicks ass. I have never felt more worn out than I do when I’m doing a HIIT session. With HIIT, you usually have bursts of exercises with minimal rest / recovery time in between each exercise and set. So for example, one of the exercises on RWL is a 9-10 minute video with 5 different exercises and 3 sets. Each exercise in the first set is 30second with a 5-10 second break in between and then the 2nd set, all exercises are 20 seconds with no break between each one and then the final set is ususally 10 seconds per exercise. With this kind of HIIT workout you usually have around 30 seconds rest in between each set. I really like these kind of exercises and I always feel like I’ve worked harder. There’s also no excuses when doing HIIT as each exercise is only really ever around 30-90 seconds long, although when you add all of those 30 seconds up – you can definitely feel the burn!

As always, the workouts are progressing week by week and slowly but surely the exercises are getting that tiny bit harder, however I am really enjoying the plan and can’t wait to start seeing some more results. So far, most likely due to my week of madness, I haven’t been seeing too much difference in my body. I definitely ache the next day and am feeling like I’m getting a little stronger as I’m finding it easier to do certain things like press ups etc than I was a couple of weeks ago. I haven’t managed to take any progress photos this week due to other commitments, but I promise I’ll have some more up in my next post as I’m really wanting to see the progress myself. Seeing these side by side compared to the start and finish photos from my last RWL plan, I am feeling a little deflated, so I’m definitely wanting to take me more so that they can ge me that much more motivated to keep mup my exercising and eating ‘on-plan’.

Have you joined Results with Lucy since reading my last set of posts? I’d love to see your progress and hear how you’re getting on with your exercise plans!